Why doesn DV seem to have any 7.5 IRE setup?
[A quick note to PAL users and non-North-American NTSC users: North American analog video has its black level raised about 7.5% from the zero-voltage black level used elsewhere in the world. This “pedestal” or “setup” is what’s being discussed.] Native DV, like any properly-recorded digital component format, doesn’t have setup. Setup exists only in the analog world and has no relationship to DV as an encoding scheme or as a tape format. DV looks like it has setup (or not) because the decks that DV is recorded in / played from may add setup (or not). All 601-conforming digital formats record nominal black at a luma level of 16, and nominal white at a luma level of 235 (in a 0-255 range, using 8 bits: there are 10-bit versions, too, like D-5 and DigiBeta, where the range is 64-940, but the DV formats are all 8-bit formats so we’ll stick with 16-235 for this discussion). When played over FireWire or over SDI or over SDTI, that’s what you get: blacks at 16, and whites at 235. When you inte
